Ethanol from corn represents 'political expediency, short-sightedness'

Editor:

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We have an energy to food crisis. Is there any foresight, common sense or logic ingrained in our members of Congress? No, it's mostly political expediency and short-sightedness.

For more than 25 years, we have seen the trend toward a world population explosion with a parallel increasing demand for basic food grains. We in the U.S. have done a great job in supplying farm products for many years to a hungry and modernizing world - properly delaying a food crisis.

At the same time, however, we have been mulling over our ever-increasing energy needs while the "libs" shut down our own resource development. Consequently, we are dependent on the world oil dictators.

To compound our problems we have stampeded into the ethanol game - a most expensive, counter-productive and environmentally unfriendly way of using a full one-third of our corn crop, raising prices all the way around. This stuff has to be trucked; it cannot be piped like oil.

Now people are screaming about food and fuel prices. Have you heard about "supply and demand"? Do you remember proposals by the Bush administration seven years ago to increase production of our own resources, and Congress denying it? If you must have ethanol, wood fiber and other biomass such as hemp is much cheaper to produce and reduces fertilizer use by 80 percent compared to corn. Did you know that this heavy fertilizer use has resulted in an oxygen-depleted dead zone off the Gulf Coast because of runoff down the Mississippi River? We just continue to shoot ourselves in the foot.

Our high consumption of foreign products and excessive debt financed by China has brought our dollar down to where we have to pay $1.60 for one Euro. Seven years ago it was one to one.

S.G. von Schweinitz

Appling